Giulia Palazzolo (University of Warwick, UK): What is animal communication?

It is a common intuition that animals communicate among themselves, and even with us humans. We commonly think and speak of cats’ meows as requests for food, and we see in dogs’ play bows an intention to communicate that they want to play. When we speak of animal communication, we humans implicitly recognise similarities between certain animal behaviours and our own communicative behaviours. But on what grounds do we draw these analogies? What makes certain animal acts similar to human communicative behaviours?   

Providing an answer to this question is more challenging than one might initially think. In the literature, there is no single consensus definition of communication. Studies of animal and human communication employ different concepts of communication, and this is partly because research on communication have developed relatively independently. 

In this paper, I focus on three dominant accounts of communication in the scholarly literature: the biological accounts of animal communication (Maynard-Smith & Harper 2003), the informational accounts of animal communication (Wheeler & Fischer 2012, Scarantino & Clay 2015) and the Gricean accounts of human communication (Sperber & Wilson 1995, ScottPhillips 2014). These accounts conceptualise communication in different ways: for the biological accounts, communication is an interaction between a signaller and a receiver where signals and responses are coevolved, i.e. are the co-product of biological selection. Informational accounts define communication as a process of natural information transmission through signals from a sender to a receiver. According to the Gricean accounts, communication is a process of expressing and recognising Gricean communicative intentions, i.e. intentions of the sender to produce an effect in the recipient at least in part through the recognition of this intention.   

In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate that the ways in which the biological, informational and Gricean accounts conceptualise communication can be contradictory. I then probe the scope of each of the three definitions (i.e. what kinds of animal and human communicative activities are encompassed by these definitions), showing that neither of them can be plausibly extended to include cases of both animal and human communication. I argue that, while it is intuitive for us to classify certain animal and human behaviours within the same category ‘communication’, we cannot justify this intuition by appealing to either of the dominant theoretical definitions. 

In the second part of this paper, I draw some constraints on what should count as an account of communication in animals and humans, which I call a Unified Account of animal and human communication (UA). I then present one recent view in the literature that satisfies the condition for a UA: Green (2019)'s theory of organic meaning. Finally, I offer some reflections on the utility of Green’s concept of communication and its disadvantages. In encompassing many instances of communication in animals and humans, Green’s account succeeds in isolating some core features of an act of communication in animals and humans. However, I conclude, Green's account may not be adequate with respect to certain explanatory goals.    

Green, M.S. (2019). Organic Meaning: An Approach to Communication with Minimal Appeal to Minds, in A. Capone, M. Carapezza & F. Lo Piparo (eds.), Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy. Springer, pp.211-228.  

Maynard-Smith, J., & Harper, D. (2003). Animal Signals. Oxford: Oxford UP.  

Scarantino, A., & Clay, Z. (2015). Contextually Variable Signals can be Functionally Referential. Animal Behaviour, 100, e1-e8.  

Scott-Phillips, T. (2014). Speaking our Minds. Palgrave Macmillan.   

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.  

Wheeler, B. C., & Fischer, J. (2012). Functionally Referential Signals: A Promising Paradigm Whose Time Has Passed. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 21(5), 195205.